Friday, April 30, 2010

Halley's Comet, a poem by Stanley Kunitz.

Post 478 - Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. He attended Harvard College, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1926 and a master's degree in 1927. He served in the Army in World War II, after a request for conscientious objector status was denied. Following the war, he began teaching, first at Bennington College in Vermont, and later at Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington. He died at the age of 100 in 2006.

His honors include the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Harvard's Centennial Medal, the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Medal of the Arts, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He served for two years as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, was designated State Poet of New York, and a Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets. In 2000 he was named United States Poet Laureate.

About his own work, Kunitz has said: “The poem comes in the form of a blessing — ‘like rapture breaking on the mind,’ as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.”

Halley's Comet by Stanley Kunitz.

Miss Murphy in first grade wrote its name in chalk across the board and told us it was roaring down the stormtracks of the Milky Way at frightful speed and if it wandered off its course and smashed into the earth there'd be no school tomorrow. A red-bearded preacher from the hills with a wild look in his eyes stood in the public square at the playground's edge proclaiming he was sent by God to save every one of us, even the little children. "Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted, waving his hand-lettered sign. At supper I felt sad to think that it was probably the last meal I'd share with my mother and my sisters; but I felt excited too and scarcely touched my plate. So mother scolded me and sent me early to my room. The whole family's asleep except for me. They never heard me steal into the stairwell hall and climb the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof of the red brick building at the foot of Green Street - that's where we live, you know, on the top floor. I'm the boy in the white flannel gown sprawled on this coarse gravel bed searching the starry sky, waiting for the world to end.